~ This blog will be an attempt to explain the significance of various works of great writing, the authors that create them, and some effort to understand correlations between great writing and contemporary events.

Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?—John Keating, Dead Poet’s Society

This essay was written on a MacBook Pro, and that should hopefully speak to the quality of the book. Product endorsement really isn’t my strong suit, and so I suppose starting this essay off by noting my shift to Apple products might not be the best way to begin writing about Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs, and in fact if it were not for my grandfather I doubt I would have made the actual switch.

My grandfather, as long as I can remember of the man, was the sort of person who could not tolerate small talk. The annual birthday meetings between him and my parents were not the casual get togethers where people would talk about television shows and try to treat desperately about the weather. I never remember small talk because my grandfather couldn’t do small talk. Rather the conversations would be about the writings of Thomas Aquinas, the politics of the day, my grandfather’s thoughts about the history of the Catholic Church, his success with certain carpentry tools, and sometimes his early fascination with computers. I tend to recall more his conversations about Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic philosophers, which is somewhat amusing given the fact that the man was married three times putting him into something charmingly referred to as a lapsed Catholic. But I do remember on the few occasions he spoke about his preference of personal computers, a term I really wouldn’t appreciate until reading Steve Jobs, and I remember him talking in great esteem of something called a Macintosh.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the computer my grandfather was gushing about positively were the exact same computers I was using in my computer classes at school to paint pictures and play educational games. Apple products were apparently always around when I was young, but I couldn’t see the fruit for the trees. That’s a play on words you see because Apple’s logo is an actual apple. On an entirely separate not I’ve also ordered a white mug with the multicolored logo that bears the inscription “Think Different,” and since buying my MacBook Pro, I’ve looked into getting an iPad
and eventually a desktop iMac. My little sister has charmingly decided to call me an “Apple Whore” after she saw the Apple logo keychain I had printed up using the library’s 3-D Printer.

I suppose I am one now, and observing this metamorphosis I realize that, even after death, Jobs has managed to continue to inspire individual people using his awe and charisma that, some would argue, tended to overshadow the man’s faults.

Before I finally sat down to read Steve Jobs (listen is the more appropriate word since I’m slowly chugging through the audiobook) I was aware of the book because my grandfather had a copy. The book came out and became a sensation, and it seemed for a while that the proliferation of the book was akin to actual Apple Products, you just couldn’t get away from it. Somehow or another I avoided having to actually sit down and read it, largely because I discovered Christopher Hitchens about the time the book came out. It was thankfully then through Hitch that I determined the quality of Walter Isaacson as a biographer. I read his Benjamin Franklin , and I intend to sit down and read his Henry Kissinger and Einstein as soon as I get the chance. It was because of these connections that I knew enough about the book to know it was worth my time, and I borrowed it from my grandfather intending to read it.

It’s been within the last year or so that his dementia started, and so I’ve lost the grandfather who was such a powerful intellect. But I still had his copy of Steve Jobs, so I started it and have now become an Apple Whore.

Isaacson deserves every bit of credit he gets for Steve Jobs, because even during the most pedantic periods of the man’s life feels vital and important to understanding the qualities of Jobs as an individual man. Passages that describe board-room meetings and phone calls become part of the great drama that became Steve Jobs’s life, and even when discussing the jargon ladened aspects of computer design Isaacson’s books never loses its sense of pace or direction. The reader is constantly observing the man of Steve Jobs. They see his highs his lows, his individual strengths, and his faults that at time have left me both shocked and repulsed. Isaacson deserves credit for this previous point as well given the fact that the temptation of biography is at times to write about the idea of someone rather than the real actual meat and bone of a human being.

And the first impression from Isaacson’s book that really hits me is how much I relate to Jobs in a sense of impending doom. In one passage he cites Jobs’s notion of his own mortality:

Jobs confided in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he needed to accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon Valley history. “We all have a short period of time on this earth,” he told the Sculley’s as they sat around the table that morning. “We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here, nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young. (155).

Recognition is one of the most powerful feelings someone can experience. It was “recognizing” Bruce Bechdel on the cover of Fun Home that helped me realize that I was queer, and it was “recognizing” Brian’s confession to Stewie in Family Guy that I really saw my suicidal thoughts for what they were. Reading Steve Jobs, I recognized someone again, because I’ve recognized a similar trait in myself. It might just be my soul-crushing morbidity that I write off as it’s own form of practicality, but I’m always aware of some kind of feeling that my life is not going to be terribly long. Part of this is rational understanding of genetics, my family doesn’t have a great track record (unless you’re a woman on my mother’s side) of a long life. The other half of this is just some kind of irrational premonition.

A person’s perception of their own life and world can be a powerful thing, and not just because it can drive you to success overall. What is consistently remarkable about the man Steve Jobs is how much I find myself remarking that the man was an unconscionable prick. There are numerous passages in the book of Jobs being either purposefully spiteful to friends, employees, competitors, or even people he simply didn’t know. It’s a common occurrence in the book to hear the man speak of a person’s work as “shit” to their face, and this became part of the man’s personality to his friends and workers. This dramatic honesty could work in both ways and the reader is quick to learn of something called “the reality distortion field.”

If the reader has never watched Star Trek (don’t feel alone I’ve never watched it either) Isaacson explains it in chapter eleven.

Tribble said that Jobs would not accept any contrary facts. “The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek,” Tribble explained. “Steve has a reality distortion field.” When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble Elaborated. “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules. (117-8).

Isaacson continues this character trait on the following page offering a more detailed analysis:

At the root of the reality distortion was Job’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him. He had some evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been able to bend reality to his desires. Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained into his character. He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one. “He thinks there are a few people who are special—people like Einstein and Gandhi, and the gurus he met in India—and he’s one of them,” says Hertzfeld. “He hold Chrisann this. Once he even hinted to me that he was enlightened. It’s almost like Nietzsche.” Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the Philosopher’s concept of the will to power and the special nature of the Überman came naturally to him. […]. If reality did not comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had done with the birth of his daughter and would do years later, when first diagnosed with cancer. Even in small everyday rebellions, such as not putting a license plate on his car and parking it in handicapped spaces, he acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around him. (119).

The reader can surely find their own examples of Jobs’s prickishness, and I should address that before the reader raises concerns. Isaacson’s biography never sugar-coats Jobs’s behavior, and when they arrive at the conception and rejection of his first child during the early days of Apple they’re sure to consider putting the book down wondering why they would ever want to learn more about a man who accused his lover with sleeping half the population of the world. I don’t have any defenses for this behavior, nor do I offer any.

Jobs was a man who, obviously, lived life by his own rules and that at times created unnecessary conflict and behavior that is, to quote my little sister, “slap-worthy.” What then is the relevance of reading about the man’s life?

Jobs could be, to borrow one of Isaacson’s favorite adjectives, “Cold” and this behavior isn’t always excusable. But to neglect understanding of Jobs simply because he was an asshole is to ignore the man’s contribution. As I’m want to do in these circumstances I tend to return to the examples of two of my influences: John Wayne and Christopher Hitchens. In the case of Wayne the man was an asshole who said some truly heinous things concerning the issue of race equality and anyone who wants a more specific details can simply Google Search his May 1971 Playboy interview. I will never defend those positions and arguments, and I will always be the first person to remind people about his bullshit attitudes towards race. At the same time, John Wayne helped establish the idea of the “movie star” and in his time, he produced a wide bodies of films that, in my mind, are still some of the finest movies ever made. Likewise with Christopher Hitchens the man was an unfortunate chauvinist going so far as to write an article titled Women Aren’t Funny and then a subsequent article Why Women (Still) Don’t Get It to defend his original position. Hitchens was a brilliant man, but in this instance, he was still talking out of his ass. In spite of this the man wrote some of the most important works of Nonfiction on the twentieth century and contributed more to the form of the essay than any writer of his time.

I could go on and provide a list of authors and geniuses who were contemptible assholes, but hopefully these two personal ones provide enough of my point, which is, just because somebody was an asshole doesn’t mean they couldn’t change the world.

Reality really is one’s perception of the world. What is possible and what is impossible, and the stories of science fiction are enough to prove this. As long as people could imagine changing the world, there were people who could figure out how to.

One passage clearly demonstrates this, as Jobs explained a vision he had for the future of computers. He was addressing his MacIntosh division in 1982 about an idea he had, while also expressing his contempt for market research:

At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “Because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” Then he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. “Do you want to see something neat?” When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit on your lap, with a keyboard and screen hinged together like a notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid- to late eighties,” he said. They were building a company that would invent the future. (143).
Now technically the very first “laptop” was not an Apple computer, but in fact something called an Osbourne 1. Just looking at a picture of it is enough to throw out the reader’s back, and the design concurs up images of the giant insect monster movies from the 50s. Even the first apple “laptop” was nowhere near the magnificent flat machines that help achieve Twitter greatness while checking out Instagram accounts and drafted infinite Pinterest pages. What’s important about this passage was, when I read I actually received a little moment of chills. This is not because of the content of the biography itself, but again because Isaacson manages constantly to write Jobs’s life into something meaningful and profoundly important for the future of human civilization.

Jobs imagined the laptop computer as something useful, but also important to people’s lives. He foresaw the opportunity to make the personal computer something that wasn’t just utilitarian for the individual consumer, but a way of enhancing and changing the market and lives of individual people. And the strength of the previous passage reveals that, even if Jobs suffered from his “reality distortion complex,” it worked. It’s impossible to picture a world without Apple or Apple products, whether it’s their software or else their actual physical products.

And Isaacson offers a key insight into one of the lasting legacies of Jobs:

Jobs was able to encourage people to define themselves as anticorporate, creative, innovative rebels simply by the computer they used. “Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry,” Larry Ellison said. “There are cars people are proud to have—Porsche, Ferrari, Prius—because what I drive says something about me. People feel the same way about an Apple product.” (332).

I typically roll my eyes at the idea that one can express individuality through corporate products, largely because so many of the products being sold are ultimately the same. Drinking Coke or Pepsi, eating a Reese’s or a Snickers, or buying McDonalds or Burger King can never in my mind craft a rhetoric about the way I choose to live my life. These
products are designed to be consumed and then shit out, and at the end of the day shit is just shit. Yet all of these companies, in fact almost every company tries to generate advertisements that sell their products as means to express yourself. And all of this can be traced back to Apple because they succeeded.

I give Apple, and other computer companies to be fair, a pass on this rhetoric because the personal computer really can say something about the way you live your life. That’s largely because the personal computer is no longer a black screen requiring long complex code entries that are encased on monstrous floppy discs. The point-click interface altered the way computer users actually worked on computers, and from there innovation has steadily helped shape the lives of entire industries. The way an individual person approaches computers, or really, the way they use computers does shape their lives.

And again, as I noted at the start of this essay, this review was written on a MacBook Pro.

I try to wait until I have finished a book before I take the time to write a review of it. I need time to digest a book, figure out it’s place and space in my world, and then try to impart the significance of it to the reader. Steve Jobs was different because though I still have around 200 pages left, I recognize how important this work is.

Reading through my grandfather’s copy I regret terribly that it took me so long to read this book and discuss with him the life of Jobs and the history of the personal computer industry. It would have been an interesting conversation with a man who influenced me tremendously intellectually, and I might have invested earlier than I did in an Apple computer. But the cards fell where they did, and even though I’ve missed the chance to have that conversation, in his own way my grandfather succeeded. I own and will continue to own Apple products now, almost certainly till the day I die.

It’s a platitude, but it’s one that remains true. The people who are crazy enough to believe they can change the world tend to do so. It’s because they are people driven by their passion and conviction that life can be changed, and that reality is exactly what we make it to be. Sometimes this can manifest in manic and even wretched behavior, but there are positive stories. It’s because of Jobs that I learned as a child how to type and learn the basics of point-click interface. It’s because of Jobs that my mother is able to write up her reviews and musings on her own website. It’s because of Jobs that the smart-phone revolution started and the idea of what a computer actually is was changed forever.

Jobs’s reality was one where the computer wasn’t just a tool, it was part of your life. And that “distorted” reality eventually became the real thing.

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes taken from Steve Jobs were derived from the Simon & Schuster Hardback first edition copy.

**Writer’s Note**

If the reader is at all interested in Apple as a company, I’ve provided some links to articles about Apple and Apple Products and businesses. Some are positive, others negative, but it’s important to get a wide variety of outlooks.

I’ve also included an great article by Wired about the influence Jobs has had on tech company founders and employees aspiring to the emulate the man and his method of management. It feels not only important, but vital for any and all people who work for, or plan of founding computer companies:

I didn’t get a chance to include it in the essay, but if the reader is at all curious about the first laptop, the Osborne 1, they can follow a link to an article on Business Insider which describes it and it’s history. Enjoy:

On one final note, I probably am, most assuredly am, an Apple Whore as my little sister says, and my wife has begun to call me that as well. I asked her briefly when she knew I was one and she responded simply, “when you bought that mug.”

This is fair, though at the same time, I mean, look at the design. Simplicity really is the ultimate sophistication.

*****Writer’s FINAL NOTE*****

Because I have to, please enjoy this Robot Chicken sketch featuring a PRETTY ACCURATE presentation of Steve Jobs, as well as a fair, completely fair, critique of both CDs and the Zune.

It’s been six years since I got my first pair of glasses. That would make me twenty-two at the time, and it’s a lovely realization that the loss of my virginity would coincide with my ability to see. It wasn’t long after getting my glasses that I decided to get a hair-cut (I looked something along the lines of Slash and Cousin It’s love child) and shortly thereafter my wife, who I had known because she sat behind in biology class, accepted a date that eventually became the most significant relationship in my life. The glasses that I bought not only served as my ability to see, they also managed to serve a secondary purpose: aging the individual who compliments them. I post a lot of photos of myself on this blog, and so my reader is able to see I wear thin wire frames in the shape of perfect circles. I’ve noticed that people really seem to like them and I’m used to people offering compliment in the vein of “I love your glasses.” However they don’t just say this. As I said before my glasses “date” the person offering the compliment because one half of them will usually say, “I love your Harry Potter glasses” while the other half says, “I love your John Lennon Glasses.” This second compliment has started to dwindle and so I have to remind people about this second person. It’s because of John Lennon that I picked these glasses in the first place, but I was part of the Harry Potter generation and I’m actually rather terrified of the day when people stop calling them Harry Potter glasses for that would mean I’m becoming a rather old man.

None of this would really explain why, going to the optometrist again recently I was inspired to write about Blade Runner.

Sitting in the chair that offered no lumbar support I looked around the room. There of course wad a chart filled with photos of various eyes suffering from a wide range of disorders and disease. To my left were the binocular machines which would test my vision. And to my right was the doctor who was telling jokes that could only come from a refreshingly dry humor that’s impossible to find in this territory. The thought of eyes though inspired me to think back on the film Blade Runner which I had watched again recently with a group of friends. There was something about eyes that I kept going back to.

This association isn’t unfounded because eyes play a critical role in the film because the way to determine the difference between a Replicant (the name for the humanoid slave robots) and humans was something called a voight-kampff exam which is an eye exam. You also have the fact that the film begins with an eye looking over a wide city-scape. When Batty, the central replicant who wants to extend his life, confronts his maker Tyrell he murders him by digging his thumbs into the man’s eyes before cracking his skull. There’s also the scene in which Batty confronts Hannibal Chew, a genetic engineer who makes eyes, and one of the other replicants slowly places eyes on his bare shoulders and Batty offers up this brief exchange:

The examples of this constant eye imagery and association could fill up an entire word document so it’s not necessary to list them all out. I simply want my reader to recognize that it was probably because of this frequent eye imagery that I began to think again about Blade Runner.

The film has, since its release in 1982, become a cult classic and an icon of both science fiction and film noir. It doesn’t hurt that the film was directed by Ridley Scott when the man was in his prime of his carear and riding high off of the success of the film Alien which had been released just three years earlier. On one side note there existed this beautiful period of great science fiction movies that, while I won’t say hasn’t been repeated, just hasn’t been matched in my estimation. Watching Blade Runner is an experience unlike any other because the film creates a new world in which the viewer is left to disappear completely into. The darkness of the city is matched only by the near constant neon lights that seem to illuminate only the figures of the people moving about the place. Advertisements tend to be more real than the human beings walking around because despite their mass-production reality, there’s a human charm to them. The near constant rain becomes not just an atmospheric aesthetic, but part of the landscape of the world. And all of this combines together to establish a place that was labeled as “cyber-punk” that has helped create a new genre in and of itself of science fiction.

Blade Runner takes in the distant future of the year 2019, which is a disappointment in and of itself because humanity has barely managed to acquire workable iPod minis let alone advanced robotics. The Tyrell corporation has created humanoid robots known as “replicants” which serve mainly as payless workers (slaves, let’s call it what it is), and the story begins when four replicants escape the off-world colonies. A former police detective named Rick Deckard is brought back onto the force in his former position of Blade Runner. His job is to hunt down the replicants and terminate them (kill them, let’s call it what it is. The rest of the story follows Deckard as he tracks down the replicants who are themselves trying to sneak into the Tyrell corporation to see if there is a way to extend their lives since Replicants are controlled by a four-year life-span.

Batty is the leader of the replicants, played brilliantly by the elusive Rutger Hauer, and as driven more than any of the group to find some way of extending his life. Throughout the film there are small shots of his hand trembling while looking like dying tissue, and I believe it’s this idea of degeneration that actually inspired me. Going to the eye doctor is repair; it’s a check to make sure the system can still run. While my hand doesn’t regularly crinkle into a trembling fist which is itself a portend for my ultimate death, I have observed the fact that my body is beginning to show some signs of wear. And thinking of such wear I’m immediately reminded of the therapist monologue in the Pickle Rick episode of Rick and Morty:

I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I’m bored when I brush my teeth or wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is, it’s not an adventure. There’s no way to do it so wrong that you might die. It’s just work. And the bottom line is some people are okay going to work and some people, well, some people would rather die. Each of us get’s to choose.

Choice is everything, and so as I contemplated the degeneration of the body while I sat in the doctor’s office, looking at those eyes on the chart, I thought about Blade Runner and how the idea of choice and time and repair becomes so wrapped up in our ideas of memory. Who I am is built upon my memories, and those in turn shape who I want to be and become. And so as I sat in the chair paying attention to how terribly my eyes had degenerated I wondered about what new glasses I would get, and what famous celebrity or fictional character people think about when they saw my new specks.

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes taken from Blade Runner and Rick and Morty were taken from IMBD. The definition of Robot was provided are of the Etymology Online Dictionary

**Writer’s Note**

I’ve included here a link to the Pickle Rick episode, specifically the therapist monologue that I’ve quoted here. Unlike the Twitter Troll Bots who seem to rail constantly against the new season and the writing thereof, I can’t help but remind them that Pickle Rick is evidence enough of how amazing this season really is. If the reader would like to hear the monologue in its entirety they can do so by following the link below:

Four months back was the most wretched of holidays, a day of the year that I dread more than anything else: my birthday. This isn’t me trying to be cute, I legitimately hate my birthday. Part of this is because of my depression and self-loathing. I’ve trained myself to consider myself worth less than dog-shit, and so when you live in a culture that reinforces a narrative that birthdays are about taking a day to celebrate someone and extol their virtues and just celebrate their existence it becomes, difficult isn’t the word, fucking agonizing. Put it simply, how do you appreciate your existence when you often consider your existence to be a waste of other people’s time? Still I’m fighting this bullshit in my head, partly because last year’s birthday was quite possibly the worst day of my entire life. This year I wanted it to be different. Part of what helped was having to work on my birthday, it kept me occupied, but the other half was about a week later my family took me to one of my favorite restaurants, Shogun’s a Japanese Steakhouse. I’m sure places like this exist around the country, but if the reader doesn’t know what this is it’s a place where patrons sit around a stove and a chef comes out and cooks their food in front of them usually performing by lighting fires, throwing bits of food into their mouth, and performing incredible stunts with knives, spatulas, and other cutlery.

I asked originally about lobster because on this night I had what I usually do when I go to Shogun’s: chicken, steak, and lobster. The lobster, it should be noted, wasn’t boiled alive in front of us, the chef simply brought out two tails, coated them with butter and seasoning, and then baked it under a steel bowl while he cooked the chicken and made jokes about me and my sister both working in libraries.

He picked up the bowl, dropped the lobster on my plate, and started with the filet mignon. I ate the lobster, and I’ll admit it without shame, it was delicious. I also, on one small side note, got my wife to try lobster for the first time ever.

This may at first seem like an opening that will then switch over into a long monologue about how I regretted it later, and how I have since made a vow to never eat lobster again. Well, fortunately, this isn’t the case. I didn’t regret ordering or eating the lobster. The only guilt I felt was a remembrance of a documentary that aired a few years ago about lobster catchers in the Caribbean who are being manipulated by big seafood providers, but I ordered a Maine lobster so that didn’t even come into the equation. I honestly don’t feel any guilt about eating lobster, unless they’re boiled. And this development, like most things in my life, has to do with reading, specifically a wonderful essay by David Foster Wallace called Consider the Lobster.

My regular reader will remember that over the last year I’ve experienced an explosion of interest in the writing of David Foster Wallace, buying up most of the books he ever wrote. I’ve read Infinite Jest (and survived) and in-between reading that book and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again, I bought a hardback copy of another one of his essay collections Consider the Lobster. It’s impossible to forget this book with it’s pure white cover, and a red lobster raising its right claw up in a kind of grim welcome to the reader. I remember seeing the book before whenever I would encounter David Foster Wallace’s writing, and my amazon account was always recommending it to me. When I asked a professor friend of mine, who I originally consulted for Infinite Jest, about it her answer was an unequivocal, “Yes, I fuckin loved that book.”

I bought a copy and started reading it the moment it arrived.

The essay was originally a field piece Wallace was assigned to write by Gourmet magazine. I wonder briefly what they knew what they were getting into when they hired Wallace because the man never just wrote about his topic, he managed to write about the philosophy and spirit of whatever material he was writing about. Wallace is specifically writing about the MLF (Maine Lobster Festival), and while he explains the significance of the event in terms of food connoisseurs and Lobster enthusiasts, the essay eventually becoming a moral conversation about the nature of being a gourmet period.

And part of that is providing a taxonomic, biological background of the lobster which, if the reader honestly believes I won’t provide a quote for you clearly have never read any of my work:

Taxonomically speaking, a lobster is a marine crustacean of the family Homaridae, characterized by five pairs of jointed legs, the first pair terminating in large pincer fish claws used for subduing prey. Like many other species of benthic carnivore, lobsters are both hunters and scavengers. They have stalked eyes, gills on their legs, and antennae.

[…]

And arthropods are members of the phylum Arthropoda, which phylum covers insects, spiders, crustaceans, and centipedes/millipedes, all of whose main commonality, besides the absence of a centralized brain-spine assembly, is a chitinous exoskeleton composed of segments, to which appendages are articulated in pairs.

The point is lobsters are giant sea insects. (237)

Part of the joy for in including that quote is knowing that somewhere out there in the world someone who has just recently eaten lobster will start to gag as they realize that cockroaches, beetles, and centipedes are related to lobsters and that they, in principle, recently ate a sea-roach. But after I get over my juvenile habit of grossing people out with facts about bugs (it’s the main reason why I never get invited to parties), there is a purpose to including this quote because it’s also part of the reason Wallace includes this background material in his essay. Shortly after this he provides a brief historical account about how lobster was seen a lower-class food, how it was often fed to criminals, and after this he explains that the principle means of cooking lobster is to boil it alive. All of this ultimately moves towards his central thesis, or, really, the central question of Consider the Lobster:

So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the U.S.: Is it right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does “all right” even mean in this context? Is the whole thing just a matter of personal choice? (243).

This question is an important one to ask, especially when you live in a society that has become more and more divorced from the reality of food. Individuals who live in the twenty-first century, specifically people who live in urban areas, tend to live in artificial environments where the reality of killing creatures for meat is a somewhat alien concept, actually, let’s be real here, it’s damn near abstract for them. Probably one of the best examples is the hog-killing scene in Forgetting Sarah Marshall where Jason Segel has to kill the hog which is screaming and grunting and then spends most of the time on the way to the party crying.

Before I get into my analysis of Wallace’s argument though I do want to take a moment to just note the previous quote and observe the man’s ability as a writer. Part of a writer’s job is not just coming up with catchy hookers that grab people’s attention and then being cute and smart and funny until you reach your word limit. Which, you’ll note, is pretty good summation for everything I do on this shitty blog. The writer’s principle job, to sound archetypal for a moment, is simply to observe humanity’s character and behavior and then to show it right back. As Wallace observes his own question he notes immediately what the reaction will be, and having asked this question in real life I understand why he prepares for a reaction. I asked my wife one night the same questions and she responded with a quick and precise “no.” Now in her defense she’s a biologist; she’s been trained to study animals and that often includes capturing them, killing them, and then cutting them up to see how they work. I tried to make my argument but she threw back plenty of facts about arthropods in general the most obvious one being that, unlike humans, they lack a real nervous system, or at least one as centralized as human beings.

That brings me back to bugs and Wallace again.

No one is really sure whether or not bugs, or arthropods feel pain. I took a few weeks of an etymology course before I realized the class wasn’t for me (I don’t think the other students liked me) and while I was there the professor of the class noted that it’s difficult to measure “pain” in arthropods. Wallace himself observes the complications of pain when he writes:

Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that other human beings experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. (246).

Wallace also notes that the conversation itself is uncomfortable as he notes just a few lines later:

The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should also add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of Gourmet wish to think about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. (246)

This last point seems to be the most poignant element of the entire essay, and all the more important. Wallace’s essay really becomes what it is in this paragraph for me because it stops being about the experience of lobster and instead becomes an opportunity for meta-cognition. If the reader doesn’t remember that word it literally means “thinking-about-thinking,” or to put it another way “thinking about the way that you think about things.” I suspect many readers of Gourmet were rather pissed at Wallace for making them revaluate choices that he himself admitted he didn’t think about, but if I can dust off a platitude, the unexamined life is not worth living.

Now I know my reader’s objection immediately: You’re a hypocrite sir, you admitted yourself that you ate lobster recently and you felt no qualms about it, so why should I feel lousy for simply enjoying lobster?

The reader makes a good point, and the only sufficient rebuttal I have is that this essay, this reflection, is a not a condemnation of people who eat lobster in general. My only aim is to ask a question which can start a moral argument, which, by it’s nature, is never going to have a clear answer for each person’s morality is subjective.

For my own part I have no intention of stopping eating lobster, however I refuse to eat boiled lobster because it seems unnecessarily cruel.

My reader will almost assuredly rebut this point and again cite Wallace himself on the issue of pain, but Wallace provides a few moments of sobering clarity for me when he observes the actual process of boiling lobsters alive by noting their reaction to the process. He writes:

However stupourous a lobster is from the trip, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook it’s claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you usually hear the cover rattling and clinking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water. (247-8).

Some might continue to object, but allow me to offer one more quote before they negate this behavior:

To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference, and it may well be that an ability to form preferences in the decisive criterion for real suffering. (251).

I tried, when I made the argument with my wife, to make this point, but I have a damn difficult time expressing my opinions and intellectual positions clearly in conversation. That’s the main reason why I write; it gives me control and a focus I lack in real life. To my wife’s credit she observed but stuck to her argument, and in fact I’m sure there are many who will do the exact same after reading my review and Wallace’s actual essay. Nobody’s going to really stop eating lobster if they don’t have any such qualms about the lobster’s potential suffering because it’s just, as I and Wallace noted before, a sea-bug. There’s no reason to observe much empathy because they’re an other.

But hopefully the reader has observed that Consider the Lobster is NOT about lobsters at all. In fact the essay is nothing more than a chance for Philosophic reflection about the way human beings act about their food. Wallace concludes his essay with two keen observations:

Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? (252-3).

And then in closing paragraph he notes:

I’m not trying to bait anyone here—I’m genuinely curious. After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? Or is all the gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be sensuous? Is it really just a matter of taste and presentation? (254)

Empathy is a tricky a word to throw out because it’s so wrapped up in morality, and morality itself tends to be clouded in religious discourse that discussing empathy for animals makes one seem naïve or “soft” or even worse, a vegetarian. For the record, vegetarians are not the scum of the earth, those are vegans. No eating cheese my ass. I fuckin love cheese.

But all this reflection reminds of a moment years ago that gave me pause for thought. I was in a biology 1201 lab course and we were waiting to start our Mid-term Practicals. I looked down and crawling beneath my feet was a small field cricket. Without thinking I slammed my foot down, enjoying the hard crack and wet crunch. I had killed crickets before, dozens of times. My father was an exterminator so killing insects really wasn’t an issue for me, it was literally just business. But when I lifted my foot and looked at the carcass I felt instantly that I had done something wrong. The cricket hadn’t bothered me. It hadn’t bitten me. Crickets aren’t known for spreading disease. Nor do they usually bite. A cricket is about the closest thing you can get to a puppy in terms of insects. It’s ridiculous to fret about wantonly stepping on a bug, but is it?

It’s easy to negate another creature’s potential suffering for the sake of your own comfort, and it’s just as easy to establish rhetoric to justify that worldview. There’s nothing wrong with killing lobsters, and if you do believe there is that means you’re either just another insane animal rights activists, or else you’re just soft bodied and want to ensure that other people don’t have a good time. I worry about this, because narrative, as I’ve demonstrated in previous writing, matters more than anything. It’s easy to spin this rhetoric and just stop asking questions about the need for a moment of empathy and reflection and that can lead to consequences. It may start as lobsters, but then it may shift to cats, dogs, dolphins, whales, and even people.

I have no business with slippery-slope arguments. Humans aren’t going to eat people anytime soon (unless they taste good with butter I suppose, but then again what doesn’t?). But fostering a lack of empathy can lead to real problems because it negates that suffering can exist in multiple forms. Once one stops caring about whether lobsters may be experiencing pain it might be easy to forget that people are dying in Syria, that the state of Israel acts like a bully and gets away with it, that women across the globe face regular sexual harassment, that workers in the meat industry tend to be illegal immigrants who are used and exploited and then quickly tossed aside once they become injured on the job, that in the united states there is a 14% illiteracy rate, and the list can go on until one becomes with numb to tragedy.

Consider the Lobster is an important essay because it asks the reader to perform a simple task: consider. This act can make people uncomfortable because most of the time people would rather not consider that their actions may be wrong, or, more appropriately, that the way of life that they’re enjoying may be at the expense of another. But asking that question is a valuable endeavor because it can foster the behavior of self-reflection and empathy for other beings which is worth more than all the lobster in the world.

And besides, there’s always bacon.

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes from Consider the Lobster in this essay were quoted from the hardback Little, Brown & Company edition. However, if the reader is interested, I have also provided a link to the original article published on Gourmet’s website. Enjoy:

In this video I provide a brief review of the graphic novel Daytripper. This is a book that, in my estimation, is one of the most underappreciated graphic novels in the ever growing canon of what Scott McCloud refers to as Graphic Art. Books like Watchmen, The Sandman, and MAUS consistently appear on lists of truly great and wonderful graphic novels yet Daytripper is left from such lists for some mysterious reason. The reader doesn’t need my validation however, nor does the book and so in this video I try to just discuss a few of the themes addressed in the book.

The graphic novel is about the life of the writer Bras de Olivas Domingo who, before he publishes his first novel to great success, works as an obituary writer. His father is a world famous novelist and throughout the book Bras mourns the fact that he and his father do not always have the best working relationship, however beneath this I believe as a fascinating glimpse into father-son relationships. Every son in his own way tries to live up to what he believes to be the supposed expectations his father establishes during his life. Looking at Bras part of that standard is creating something out of his life, and so his novel, and then eventually his life, becomes that very means.

Daytripper is a book that explores life in all of its absurdity and mundane reality, and while each chapter ends in death, the larger creative goal seems to be to demonstrate that life is not purely beautiful or purely meaningless. Instead Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon try to show the odd magic that makes up life without resorting to clichés. This last word is important because when you say “the book is about life” the reader may summon up images of Once-A-Day-Faith Calendars or else platitude ridden Valedictorian speeches. There are many works which try to tell readers that life is wonderful and strange, but Daytripper is unique amongst this bunch because it actually shows them this through Bras’s first kiss, meeting the woman who would become his wife, being a spectator in a home invasion, writing close to a hundred obituaries for a Plane Crash, discovering he has terminal cancer, and losing his friend to madness.

Daytripper doeesn’t take the life of a superhero or a mythic being as its protagonist. Instead it finds an individual man who is trying to find some sense of meaning or purpose in his life. That should be a universal appeal enough to convince the reader that this book is made of magic. But if it isn’t hopefully this video, and the two essays I’ve written about it will.

Blasphemy is a bit of an acquired taste, and it’s a lot like salt: in small doses it can bring flavor, in large doses it just leaves you dry and wanting desperately for water as you gag on it. For the record that last bit is actually true. I once emptied half a salt shaker on an egg roll when I was around five and after biting into it I went into a shock before trying to rub the salt off my tongue on the sleeve of my mother’s dress. It’s not a terribly fond memory since we were in a group and most of the other people in attendance got a little chuckle at my expense, but the visual metaphor I think retains its poignancy as I decided I would write to you about the graphic novel Preacher by Garth Ennis.

Before I continue B—- I just wanted to make sure that you and Charlie are okay. In your previous letter you sounded like you and Charlie were having some problems. Now it is my first philosophy in life to stay out of other people’s relationships; people who offer advice freely about how to handle other people’s relationship problems are suspect to me and tend to be emotional leeches. If you ever want to talk about it know that I’m here and that I’m a listener first when it comes to people’s problems. Far too many people don’t realize that, when it comes to shit like that, all you really need to be is a listener.

Getting back to Preacher though, I recommended it to you because the last graphic novel we discussed was Punk Rock Jesus. To be honest with you I feel that that book succeeds far better than Preacher in terms of understanding and exploring the complexity of the theology and philosophy of Christianity in society. Whereas that book had a point to make about the mixing of capitalism and religion, Preacher seems, for the most part, to be blasphemy for the sake of blasphemy.

Since you told me you haven’t read it I’ll give you a brief synopsis of the plot. A minister by the name of Jesse Custer is giving a sermon in his church the day after a drunken outburst at the bar and in the middle of the service a being of color and light bursts through the window, occupies Jeese’s body, and creates an explosion that kills everyone in the church. The creature is called “Genesis” and it’s revealed later that it is the love child conceived when an angel from heaven and a demon from hell fell in love and made love. Genesis gives Jesse the “power of god,” allowing him to command people to perform actions against their own freewill. While he’s wandering he runs into a vampire named Cassidy and a woman named Tulip. The first volume follows Jesse, Tulip, and Cassidy through the first part as they make their way to New York City to figure out what Genesis is, in the second half Jesse and Tulip are captured by Jesse’s grandmother and her servants. Jesse’s past is revealed as the reader observes that Jesse was raised in an emotionally, physically, and psychologically abusive household which is putting it mildly. Jesse watches his grandmother’s servants shoot his father in the head, shoot his best friend, drag his mother away, and he himself is placed in a coffin which is sunk into a river and left there for weeks at a time. All the while Jesse is searching for god because, as it’s revealed in the book, god has abandoned his position in heaven and Jesse wants to know why.

Just describing the plot, I recognize that it sounds outlandish or crazy, but so is the plot of Catch-22 and that book is not only required reading but also one of the most influential books in the American literary canon. Preacher is unlikely to ever attain such status for like I said above Blasphemy for the sake of blasphemy is like too much salt, and at times Preacher is like taking a deep swallow of it.

Now to be fair be I’m not immune to this impulse. While I detest anti-theism there is at times an impulse to roll my eyes and make easy pot-shots at religion when my Christian friends wax philosophical about their faith and their beliefs. There is the impulse when, after a friend has explained why they believe in god and the afterlife and heaven and why they’re happy with the life they’ve chosen I do wish sometimes that I could yell:

“It’s a bunch of self-absorbing bullshit. You believe in god because you still buy into the idea that the universe gives a shit about you, and the outdated geocentric, human centered reality that man is the center of ALL creation. If you weren’t such a narcissist you might be able to get your head out of your ass and realize that human life, when set against the enormity of creation, basically amounts to the dick lint of infinity and no amount of ancient texts are going to change that.”

I would like to say that sometimes, but what holds me back is the fact that responding like that only clouds up the discourse with nasty rhetoric and I would come across as self-righteous and, even worse, “the typical all-knowing egomaniacal atheist.” I distrust the impulse to say these words B——, because they feel too cathartic. There’s nothing wrong with releasing emotion from time to time, but in conversations, especially philosophical ones, emotions should be contained as much as possible lest you dissolve the conversation into pathos and ad hominem attacks. What matters most in discussing whether or not god exists is not the arguments themselves but the way people express the arguments.

Looking at Preacher then there is a real problem because Garth Ennis doesn’t try to make a fair conversation about theism, he’s just pushing religious buttons hoping somebody somewhere will crack and try to yell at him. It’s shock value, and the problem with shock value is, over time, people become inured to it, and when they become inured they become bored. The reason why Marilyn Manson isn’t shocking anymore, the reason while Alice Cooper is a cartoon character, the reason why Black Sabbath now has fans that span at least three generations is that people eventually stop being shocked. I would argue though that the difference between Marilyn Mansion, Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, and Garth Ennis is that the previous three actually make art that’s worth your time.

Also for the record B—— you should totally look up IOWA by Slipknot. It’s their Death Metal record so it’s going to be intense, but if you can survive through it you’ll love Slipknot till the day you die. People = Shit and Disasterpeice and Left Behind. Listen to those first.

Ennis’s book abounds with scene after scene of horrible people doing horrible things in the name of god or divine will and by the end if becomes difficult to find any sympathetic figure. By the end I did find myself liking the character of Jesse, but not because he was a good person, but because he was able to survive a living hell and find faith, not in god per say, but in himself. At this point though B—-, I imagine that I can predict your question.

The answer is yes Margot Robbie was a great Harley Quinn, and those lame critics on Rotten Tomatoes be damned, I fucking loved Suicide Squad. Definitely see it, if only to make fun of Charlie when Margot Robbie’s bodacious bootie wiggles around in those ridiculous hotpants. Seriously after leaving the film even my sister said they should have called the film “Margot Robbie’s Bodacious Ass Wiggles in Hot Pants…The Movie.”

The answer to your second question B——, is how exactly does one find any kind of redeemable reason to read a book like Preacher? This is a conflict because I don’t at first glance have an answer besides the fact that it is legitimately entertaining and does offer some opportunity for reflection about faith and blasphemy. For myself B——, the point of reading Preacher is about four pages in the book that allow the reader to be both shocked and reflective about the nature of faith.

Tulip is shot in the head in front of Jesse and is brought back to life by god who asks only that she have faith. She refuses, and reading this passage I think about my own position.

Here’s the point B—–. Even if god exists I would not have faith. Some people are able to balance the idea of a god with the “problem of evil,” but I cannot for that doesn’t absolve a creator. The reason I’m an atheist is because I do not recognize any empirical evidence for the existence of a divine being or creator, and even if there was, all that would change is my belief that god exists. My high school biology teacher, still one of the smartest men I’ve ever met, once held a religious conversation with some of his students. Dr. Bradford held a doctorate in biology but also had a Master’s in theology and so he asked them “What is faith?” a few of them began their arguments with “the belief in god,” but he would interrupt them with a solid “no” and finally they got frustrated and asked him what faith was. His response has never left me: “faith is trust. You trust in god. Even if you believe in god that doesn’t mean you trust him.” This to me is and always shall be everything. Even if god exists, and proof appears to validate this possible fact, I cannot in good conscience trust this god.

Some might say that this is unfair or me, or claim that I simply cannot see the bigger picture. This may be true, but neither do my contesters. Like me they are limited by their humanity, their faults and bias, and so when they come to me speaking about the infinite wisdom of the creator and his unfailing love for them all I can do is roll my eyes. It’s not out of condescension, it’s more out of the recognition of cognitive dissonance. Man wants his god to be above him, to possess more wisdom than himself, but the opposite is true. Men make god after their own image and I have to fall back upon Lex Luthor for this in Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice:

Lex Luthor: The problem of you on top of everything else. You above all. Ah. ‘Cause that’s what God is. Horus. Apollo. Jehovah. Kal-El. Clark Joseph Kent. See. What we call God depends upon our tribe, Clark Jo. Because God is tribal. God take sides. No man in the sky intervened when I was a boy to deliver me from Daddy’s fist and abominations. Mm mm. I’ve figured it out way back, if God is all powerful, he cannot be all good. And if he’s all good then he cannot be all powerful. And neither can you be. They need to see the fraud you are. With their eyes. The blood on your hands.

The moment I referred to earlier in Preacher when god himself has appeared bathed in divine light after bringing Tulip back to light and he begs her to beseech Jesse to give him his trust and Tulips response is incredible, for it’s the exact same response I’ve had to the notion of god in my own life:

Growing up in the environment I did I desperately wanted to say, actually scream out often to god to “cut the shit.” In fairness, due mostly to retrospect, my problem was not with god but with Christians themselves. It was always a sell, it was always a dogma, it was always the call to blindly follow and wholly trust, and the problem was often that thus trust involved some sacrifice of my principles because “trust” meant bashing gay people, voting republican, being prejudiced against Mexicans and blacks (though this was always hinted at or suggested without ever being outright spoken, you know “those people”), and burning copies of Harry Potter.

That last one’s important because you don’t fuck with Harry Potter. Period.

If Preacher achieves any kind of artistic statement, it’s in these two pages because it affords a new reality for readers and individual thinkers. I know this may sound like pathos B——, but reading does open up new worlds and often times I feel like I’m living in a different world now that I don’t believe or trust in god. This doesn’t always make life easy, in fact sometimes it makes it far more difficult. My life has become painfully shorter for the benefit of an afterlife is gone, but this only places me in a position in which I have to “cut the shit” and really recognize my problems because there isn’t someone looking out for me. What I do with my time isn’t just a sentence, it’s a real reality. Living without god, or faith in god, is stepping out of narcissism because it reduces the ego. Once mankind steps away from god they step out of the center of all creation, and while life in this new space isn’t always pleasant, as Preacher clearly demonstrates, it does make you see the world in a new way.

Reading Preacher is not easy if you are easily offended or unused to having your religious or moral convictions challenged. It’s important to remember that challenges are different than outright assault, and being fair to the book, Preacher is a book designed to push buttons far more than it is about challenging the reader. Ennis’s book is about showing all the negative sides to Christianity, while also squeezing in some blasphemy for fun, and the problem with this is that it doesn’t really encourage reflection or growth. Reading this book becomes an exercise in “allright what blasphemous shit is he gonna write next?” The three pages cited earlier though do redeem the book B——, at least so far as to ask yourself: if there was a god, would you trust him?

You know where I stand.

Blasphemy for the sake of blasphemy becomes tiresome and repugnant, because long after the shock of blasphemy is over there’s precious little, if any, art worth mentioning. The conflict then is that if an artist doesn’t have anything better to do than shock his reader, then he really hasn’t produced anything worth reading. But at least there’s the spirit of John Wayne reminding Jesse to be strong, so it ain’t all bad.

Sincerely, yours in the best of confidence and support,

Joshua “Jammer” Smith

P.S.

You may have noted that I sound a little bitter. I can assure you that only appears when I listen to poor arguments, or spot a Joel Olsteen book in a pile of “Local Favorites” at Barnes & Noble. It’s not that I’m a bitter man, I just can’t stand Joel Olstean. And to be fair is there any thinking person who doesn’t?

P.P.S.

Waited till the end for this. I loved Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn but I hated those hot pants and those heels. Harley Quinn is a gymnast and she’s expected to do all those crazy stunts in heels? Bullshit. I’ve tried running in boots with a one-inch heel and I damned near fell and busted my ass, and Harley Quinn is supposed to be able to flips and kicks in stiletto heels? I’m willing to suspend my disbelief in super hero films only so far.

Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse on the same screen will never happen again. The reality of licensing issues, as well as Disney’s general soullessness will prevent their beloved Mickey from ever appearing on screen alongside Bugs Bunny who’s fallen upon hard times in recent reboots. The other problem is the fact that the last time he was on screen alongside the infamous rabbit the following scene appeared:

I remember being a kid and watching this scene enraptured by the fact that Mickey Mouse could appear alongside Bugs Bunny, who was always my favorite of the two (he just had more character than Mickey) on the same screen. Even at that age I understood the basics of corporate copyright and that even though it would be awesome for the pair of them to star in a cartoon together, the adults in charge of such decisions didn’t want it because it would be complicated, cost money, and that you’d probably have to involve lawyers. I take some pride in recognizing that even at that age I realized that most lawyers were subhuman. Still watching this scene just the other day with my family I was amazed even then that such a moment could actually happen. That’s why the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Has remained not only one of my favorite films, but also one that leaves me intrigued.

Before I get to that though I need to address Jessica Rabbit.

My first introduction of the character wasn’t actually her vivacious performance in the film, but actually a few cartoons of her in one of my father’s Playboys. I’ve written before that I would often steal these magazines and look through them entranced by the naked women found therein, but between my careful studies of the centerfolds I actually really enjoyed the comics and artwork. Jessica Rabbit, before I knew who she was, was one of my favorites for two obvious reasons: the first was her two curvaceous breasts and the second was her ridiculous body shape, see what I did there? Since the film premiered in 1988, Jessica Rabbit has become a cartoon sex symbol before Japanese tentacle porn became a parody of itself. Straight men everywhere had collected hard-ons for Jessica Rabbit, and the following lines were memorized by puberty-stricken boys (like I was some painfully short time ago) everywhere:

Jessica Rabbit: You don’t know how hard it is being a woman looking the way I do.

Eddie Valiant: You don’t know how hard it is being a man looking at a woman looking the way you do.

The various boobs puns and physical jokes made Who Framed Roger Rabbit the secretly adult film that everybody enjoyed. The conflict became, as so often happens, with young men who couldn’t get laid turning her character into a fetish. Roger Rabbit, Jessica’s husband, is a dork and a nerd by any standards and so the relationship has become a kind of symbol for bitter men everywhere. The attitude of “Girls should like me because I’m a nice guy” has festered into something perverse and Jessica Rabbit became a prominent figure in this fucked up farce of manners. Jessica Rabbit, with her fleshy plump boobs, was the girl every guy wanted to get, and the boys who watched the film figured that because they were dorks like Roger that meant that they “deserved” a girl as equally attractive.

The problem with this mentality is that it’s bullshit.

The relationship between Roger and Jessica was never about Jessica feeling that Roger deserved her, and in fact had these bitter men been paying attention they would have noticed this. Roger is a dork and a clutz, but he treats his wife with respect. Rather than worshipping her, or lavishing affection on her solely because she’s beautiful, Roger treats her as an equal. Roger doesn’t see a woman with massive breasts, he sees a woman whom he loves and respects and in this way Who Framed Roger Rabbit? managed to give one of the most missed feminist narratives in cinematic history.

Likewise many young men apparently missed a subtle important lesson later in the plot:

Case and point: Just because you’re nice doesn’t mean you’re going to get the girl; you’ve got to do something that impresses her enough to realize you’re worth her time and humor certainly helps.

This review isn’t just about Jessica Rabbit’s breasts and feminism however, for while at first the film may appear just a wacky romp involving a once in a lifetime merging of licensing and corporate products, the film is actually one of the great murder mystery movies of all time. The reason for this success is really Bob Hoskins and Christopher Lloyd. These two men hold a special place in my heart as actors because both men starred in films that helped shape my early mind and self. Christopher Lloyd shall always be the wacky librarian from The PageMaster, and Bob Hoskins will always be Mr. Smee from the movie Hook. While neither men achieved A-list celebrity status in their life they both managed throughout their careers as actors to bring something unique to their craft as well as their performances.

Bob Hoskins plays Eddie Valiant, a former police detective who’s retired after his brother was murdered by a toon in a place called Toon-Town. For the record his brother had a piano dropped on his head and no that isn’t a joke. It is but it isn’t, does that make sense? Down on his luck and struggling with alcoholism Eddie’s hired by R.K. Maroon, head of Maroon pictures to take photographs of Roger Rabbit’s wife. He discovers that Jessica Rabbit is playing Patty-Cake with Marvin Acme (the hand game, phrasing, though it really is just patty-cake) and when Roger Rabbitt find out he goes nuts. When Marvin Acme has a safe dropped on his head everybody looks to Roger, especially a character by the name of Judge Doom. The film follows Roger and Eddie as the two of them try desperately to prove Roger’s innocence and figure out “who dunnit?” Signs point originally to Roger, then Jessica, then R.K. Maroon, then finally to Judge Doom played by Lloyd.

Christopher Lloyd, as I said before, will always be the cooky librarian from The PageMaster, as well as the Pagemaster himself, and in many ways it’s disgraceful how underappreciated he is as an actor. Playing Judge Doom the man manages to outperform almost everyone apart from Hoskins, the pinnacle point being his brief monologue explaining why he wants to destroy Toon-Town and all cartoons period:

Judge Doom: [Explaining his plan to wipe out Toon Town] A few weeks ago I had the good providence to stumble upon a plan of the city council. A construction plan of epic proportions. We’re calling it a freeway.

Judge Doom: Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena. Smooth, safe, fast. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past.

Eddie Valiant: So that’s why you killed Acme and Maroon? For this freeway? I don’t get it.

Judge Doom: Of course not. You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night. Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.

It’s difficult to accurately convey how hilarious this plan is unveiled, and while from afar it seems ridiculous the reason is because it is. The film is set in 1947, before the Eisenhower administration would begin the massive infrastructure project that would actually make this “freeway” a reality. The joke of course is that nobody would build this monstrosity because it would reduce the natural “beauty” of the Californian landscape, not to mention destroy Toon-Town which brings people true happiness. Judge Doom doesn’t care however for its ultimately revealed that he himself is a homicidal toon, the very toon in fact who killed Eddie’s brother.

The reader may at this point wonder what the real artistic merit of this ridiculous film could be? By the sounds of it the film is ludicrous and possibly sexist and so what value could there be other than the nostalgia factor of watching Loony Tunes and Disney characters intermingle?

This is a fair question given the fact that from afar this film may not seem to possesses much depth, but in fact Who Framed Roger Rabbit? explores an important idea: the American Creative Landscape.

Animation was not invented Americans, but it was certainly developed and processed by them. Men like Walt Disney through his Mickey Mouse and Goofy specials steadily introduced new possibilities for storytelling through animation. The physical stunts of Goofy remain a standard of physical comedy equal to actors like Charlie Chaplain and Buster Keaton. Much later when Warner Brothers would begin to fashion the characters of Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Wiley Coyote, these standards and story structures would alter as the slapstick of ACME inventions and “Wabbit Season” became not just amusing shorts, but the defining images of a generation. Toons are an American invention and the landscape they inhabit typically involves the American landscape. Take Wiley Coyote, the man, or coyote really, who defined the term quagmire. His relentless efforts to capture the Roadrunner to satisfy his hunger always take place on the American highway, specifically the western plains of Utah and Colorado with its steeps and canyons. Bugs Bunny, still history’s greatest winner, came to embody the idea of America and what America stood for. It wouldn’t be until Jim Henson created Kermit the Frog that Americans would have a non-human that so embodied the American spirit. I may be gushing now, but all that I am attempting to convey is the fact that generations of young people grew up watching Loony Tunes and Disney movies, and so in many ways cartoons constitute a greater reality for people of my and previous generations than their own government or elected officials.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is a murder mystery but it is also a reproduction of consciousness. Watching cartoons growing up, laughing at them, and internalizing these characters there’s a moment in the film that should create a necessary pause for reflection. Eddie’s stopped Roger from entertaining some drunks in a bar:

Eddie Valiant: You crazy rabbit! I’m out there risking my neck for you, and what are you doing? Singing and dancing!

Roger Rabbit: But I’m a toon. Toons are supposed to make people laugh.

Roger Rabbit: That’s right! A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it’s the only weapon we have.

An old expression goes “first kill all the lawyers.” In dictatorship there’s another adage: “First kill all the writers.” Power is a force and influence that holds sway over our reality because ultimately every human being attempts in some way to achieve it and hold fast to it; the moral degenerates of society that desire power so that they may stamp out their own failings despise laughter because ultimately power is reduced by laughter. The reason a society protects the rights of comedians and writers to tell jokes is because it allows the people, who hold lesser powers than the chiefs of state, to feel for a moment that they are equal. Laughing at Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush impression, at Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression, and Dan Akroid’s Regan impression humanized those men because people began to remember that politicians are human beings, fallible human beings. Who Framed Roger Rabbit?is not a political film by any means, but this small clip is a reminder of the power that power holds over people.

Characters like Bugs Bunny, Goofy, and Bettie Boop are in many ways more real than Kings and Presidents because they have contributed more directly to people’s personal lives. Laughing at Wiley Coyote blowing himself up was always more real than the Monica Lewinsky scandal as a kid because it had more pressing relevance. Laughing at the coyote’s failure was a way of coping with the chaotic, and at times, malevolent real world that was childhood. When I watched him blow up I didn’t think about being picked on because I was bad at sports, or that I felt like I wasn’t a good son to my father, or about the way my grandparents would fight. Laughter is the only way to combat the real absurdity of human existence.

For example, combatting the prospect of death, one can always fall back upon the old gags:

Roger Rabbit: [taking drink] Listen, when I say I do, that means I do.

[Roger smokes up, releasing himself from Judge Doom, and Eddie takes out the Weasels]

Ultimately no one knows who Judge Doom really was, or why he did the things he did, but in the end a gathering of Toons assembles when Acme’s will is discovered and it all ends with Porky Pig saying goodbye to the audience. Toons embody a plane of the human consciousness that is ultimately unknowable, but their power over us is undeniable and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is about exploring that terrain. On the one hand watching Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny fall together in one shot is about nostalgia and pathos, but on the other hands it’s an opportunity to look upon the physical gag of opening a parachute and finding a tire instead. It’s a cheap gag, and will make you laugh, but in that moment the world is reduced to a memory and philosophic opportunity.

Laughing at Eddie Valiant fall is remembering the joke, and for a moment parting with who we are to abandon ourselves to sheer absurdity. Reality is weird and even after thousands of years human beings really have no idea what is going on in existence. Faced with such overwhelming absurdity laughing at a rabbit get a fridge dropped on his head really isn’t that far away from recognizing your own mortality and laughing it off.

And so, as a great man once said:

[last lines]

Porky Pig: All right. M-m-m-ove along now. Th-th-there’s nothing left to see here. That’s all folks. Mmm, I like the sound of that. [Turns to audience; iris closes in on Porky and “Merry-Go-Round Broke Down” plays on soundtrack] Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!

*Writer’s Note*

There wasn’t really an opportunity to include it in the essay, but in one of my favorite Calvin Hobbes sketches the two friends are walking through the woods talking about absurdity and how odd it is that human beings laugh at it. If you pay attention there’s a moment of philosophic and comedic brilliance that could only ever be achieved by Bill Waterson. Enjoy:

This essay was originally published on The North American Society for the Study of Romanticism’s blog. The full essay can be read on their home page by accessing the link at the end.

I want to say it was Stephen Fry who argued that John Keats might have gone on to become the next William Shakespeare had he lived a bit longer, though it may have in fact have been Christopher Hitchens. It’s odd not knowing the origin of that quote, because I get those two mixed up rarely—then again, the accent and a general contempt for belief in any sort of divine being are traits common to both these men, so I’ll cut myself some slack. It is an interesting statement when taken from afar, because at first I’m willing to agree with it. Upon reflection, however, I feel that this is in fact a real disservice to John Keats as a poet, for while Shakespeare is a standard that I think many writers should aspire to (or at least would appreciate as a lovely comparison), I think Keats as a writer managed in his own way to attain his own identity.

Speaking of which, as of late, that idea has begun to become more and more complicated. It may be just part of the student complex, but I’ve blossomed in the academic setting because the world has provided me with a sense of structure, organization, and purpose. School has given my life direction which in turn provided me with the confidence to begin writing again, or at least push the writing I was doing in a more productive route. I’ve now spent the last six years working and writing, and with a recent acceptance for a publication I’ve gotten to the point I don’t flinch at admitting I’m a writer. School and regularly writing for this website as well as my own has given me an identity…and it’s about to be over, as I transition from graduating to starting something new.

Since this is my last essay for this organization, I struggled to figure out what I was going to actually write next. Since it’s the last essay, I felt I should end with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner since that was what my first essay for this site was about, but honestly that felt a bit kitsch and I hate sentimentality. The worst part about transitions is the way ritual so alters our reality, and rather than just pushing forward we have to stop and let the end totally consume us so that we can achieve some kind of closure and process that we’ve done something with all this time.

Don’t get me wrong, we should enjoy and relish in our achievements, but I’d rather have this last post honestly say something than be a long drawn-out goodbye.

W.H. Auden is a poet that I learned about through Christopher Hitchens, for he is cited regularly throughout Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22 (the index lists him on 16 pages, I counted), his epigrams appear in numerous essays, and he was the focus of Hitchens’ entire article The Long Littleness of Life* which was published in the New York Review of Books and my copy of Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere which I’ll be reading as soon as I finish this essay. I trust Hitchens to never disappoint (unless we’re talking about whether women are funny or not, but that’s another essay), and so when I began reading Auden here and there I was always floored. The man’s ability with language is everything one should want in a poet, and given the fact he was a postmodernist he was right up my alley. The Vintage Paperback Press W.H. Auden: Collected Poems remains on permanent reserve in my personal library.

My reader may ask what a postmodernist has to do with the Romantics; slow down, I’m getting to it. I like to talk and hear my own voice as I write and I’m also a big fan of lead-ins, don’t forget. Thinking of Stephen Fry, which might actually have been Christopher Hitchens, speaking about John Keats made me think of Auden because both Keats and Auden both have written poems involving Greek reliquary.

The notion of god is not lost on this former Episcopalian. Growing up in the church that I did god was, for the most part, a benevolent character that for some reason had decided to live in the clouds, bestow love and wisdom to human beings, and only ever ask that you not fall asleep during the Sermon. The god of Baptists on other hand, the god I was supposed to worship according to my teachers, principals, and abstinence-only guidance lectures, seemed to be a bit of a prick. This perception didn’t change as I aged. As I read more and more about god, and gods in general for that matter, the general impression derived was that the divine beings, who always seem annoyed or vexed by male homosexuality (lesbians don’t exist outside of pornography apparently) and masturbation, were colossal pricks. There are days when I miss that Episcopal god, because out of all deities I’ve come across he seemed to most accommodating, or at the very least that dude you could go fishing with on a Friday afternoon and have a beer with and just relax. Yeah his boyfriend is a little high maintenance, but the guy makes pretty good lasagna so you’re cool…for now.

The idea or role of god has been bouncing around in my head as of late, though the term god is something of a misnomer here. Perhaps titan is better. I’ve been considering more and more the character Prometheus for, apart from being the title of one of my favorite films, he seems particularly relevant as I approach graduating with my masters and becoming a teacher. The romantic image of Prometheus giving man the secret of fire and then suffering for attempting to help by spreading knowledge is a narrative I suspect all writers and teachers keep close to their secret hearts. We all want to change the world in our own way, and while this self-vision may be pathos, Prometheus will at some point make his appearance into the psychology of any person who teaches.

The narrative of Prometheus is defined by its very defiance. Zeus, upon overthrowing his father and becoming king of the gods assigned various jobs/aspects/locations/vocations/etc. to the other deities. Apollo became god of the sun, Hera became goddess of the home and mothers, Pallas Athena became champion of knowledge and wisdom, Ares the god of war, and so on until you get Priapus, which, dear lord did that really need its own deity?

Nevermind, just googled it, yeah it did.

When Zeus was finished metaphorically waving his dick around (you’re still seeing Priapus aren’t you, is that even attractive?) and establishing his kingdom decided he would eliminate mortals and create a new race, however Prometheus stole fire and gave it to humanity thus stymieing Zeus effort and incurring his wrath.

That is one interpretation of Prometheus, for as so often happens in mythology there are many different versions of the man’s character. Before you suggest that that’s stupid inconsistency please remember that there are well over 30 different denominations of Christianity and the core belief of that religion is to be a good person and be kind for the poor and that most of the differences between them are about when the wine turns into Christ’s blood. This image of Prometheus as the rebel Titan defying Zeus’s will have to be the functional model of the man as I discuss 50 dancing Greek dudes.

A few years back I went to a small bookstore in my hometown called The PeaPicker. It’s a charming little place with half the store being a wall of Harlequin romance novels. In the back on the opposite wall are the classics, and on the day I took my wife to go book shopping (an activity that I now recognize I have to do alone because my wife rarely reads anything that isn’t on her phone) I found a small Penguin Classics copy of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. At the time I was still an undergraduate, but I recognized the name Prometheus from a few slim mentions in high school, but mostly because I’d observed in my Norton Anthology of English Literature a play written by Percy Shelley entitled Prometheus Unbound. The title stirred something in me and I knew I had to buy the book. We returned to my wife’s, at that time fiancé’s, apartment and while she played Skyrim I read the play understanding at most three or four words. I placed Prometheus Bound on my shelf when I returned home and let it rest there until I heard its sirens call me once more.

Part of me wants to say it was watching Prometheus again lately, but in all honesty it’s likely because I’m about to graduate and start teaching and so there’s some pompousness on my part that I, like Prometheus, will be teaching man the art of fire which, in this case is writing. The realistic scenario is I’ll teach three kids what a semi-colon is.

I can at least teach somebody here a little bit about Greek Drama and the play. As the title suggests there’s a man by the name of Prometheus and he signs a six month lease on his apartment…

I really shouldn’t try to be funny.

Prometheus has defied the will of Zeus and so the titan is bound to a rock by the god Hephaestus who pities him, and the rest of the play is Prometheus talking with the Chorus, various gods and heroes that appear, all while standing in a pseudo-crucifixion stance. If that doesn’t sound terribly exciting remember this is an age before indoor plumbing and Netflix so you had to find some way to spend a Friday night apart from boy-boffing (only if you’re in Athens though). Fortunately for the reader though Prometheus does not mince words and explains outright to the Chorus why he has suffered this fate:

Now, for your question, on what charge Zeus tortures me, I’ll tell you. One succeeding to his father’s throne at once he appointed various rights to various gods, giving to each his set place and authority. Of wretched humans he took no account, resolved to annihilate them and create another race. This purpose there was no one to oppose but I: I dared. I saved the human race from being ground to dust, from total death. (27).

If this isn’t clear enough they simplify the matter on the following page:

Chorus: Your gift brought them great blessing.

Prometheus: I did more than that: I gave them fire. (28).

Greek Drama is a difficult animal to tackle when arguing about relevance to contemporary society. Most people would hear the name drama alone and immediately picture a naked man covered in meat screaming about Marxism and Jingle Bells. Ahh, how I love the legitimate theatre. Greek drama especially seems to have been reserved to a few handfuls of academics and rich people who like to feel smart, and I recognize that most people will live their entire lives without sitting down to actually read this play. Despite this I’m not resigned and I can least share a few interesting facts before I get to Neil Gaiman.

Greek Drama was the institution that refined the genre of tragedy, you know that thing that happened to Bing Bong in Inside Out (*in hushed whispers* NEVER FORGET). Originally tragedy, and I had to consult an actual PhD in Greek Drama for this information by the way, thanks Dr. Streufert, was known as “dithyramb.” It was basically a long poem set to dance while 50 people danced to it. Another playwright by the name of Thespis decided one day, “Hey let’s take one guy out and make the play around him!” This would eventually create the figure of the protagonist, a narrative structure everyone recognizes, and the remaining 49 people would become “The Chorus.” Drama would continue to develop eventually introducing the deuteragonist (the second dude who isn’t the hero) and then multiple characters, but my principle concern here is Prometheus Bound and the oddity of the play.

Reading this book in the context of mythology is rather interesting because, if you had to read Edith Hamilton like I did growing up, the character of Zeus seems reminiscent of the Christian god, until you really dig into actual mythology. Prometheus talks to the Chorus often of Zeus and one passage near the end strikes me:

I swear that Zeus, for all his obstinacy, shall yet be humbled, so disastrous shall this marriage prove which he proposes—a marriage that shall hurl him out of throne and sovereignty into oblivion. […] There is no god but I who can reveal to him the way to avert this ignominy. I know it all. So let him sit on, serenely confident in his celestial thunders, brandishing thunderbolt—that will not save him: His fall will be sure, shameful, unendurable! (47).

In my notes written on a cheap yellow legal pad I have the words written, “Political attack on unchecked power” and after that a quote I have “Even Zeus bows to necessity.” It’s difficult to understand the fallible lack of omniscience in deities if you grew up immersed in the Christian monotheism that I did. God seems all-knowing and yet reading Prometheus Bound it becomes clear that being a god does not make one immune from fault or pride. Prometheus as a character alone seems to possess foresight yet even this does not make him immune from having some kind of character.

Looking at this play I struggled to find some correlation, some literary connection, and when looking at gods and goddesses I look to Neil Gaiman.

The Sandman series is perhaps the most literary re-imagining of mythology in our time period, not to mention one of the most outstandingly original series in the last two decades. I remarked to several of my friends in a bi-weekly graphic novel book club that I truly hate Neil Gaiman because the man could sneeze in his hand and manage to turn it into art, and then probably have Dave McKean do the cover for it using nothing but medical waste and cat calendars. The series currently stands as ten books of the collected single issues along with the most recent work Overture (which was *meh,* let’s be honest) and Endless Nights (which was *dude*) and follows the adventures of “Dream” one of the “Endless” beings that govern over a fabric of existence. Dream is only one of seven siblings: Destruction, Delirium (who used to be Delight), Despair, Desire, Destiny, and, to quote from Seasons of Mist “And there’s Death.”

Sandman Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes is not the best book in the series, that station is (I hope TJ reads this and notes I took the time to write this down) the second Volume A Doll’s House, but the final chapter in the book makes the entire story worth it. Dream, in the beginning has been captured by group of cultists attempting to capture Death thereby ending human mortality. Instead they capture Dream and lock him in a bubble for a hundred years until he finally escapes. The reader follows him as he retrieves his armor and magical objects and at the end of his journey, in the issue The Sound of Her Wings he finds himself in a slump, not sure how to continue when he’s joined by a young woman:

There are few introductions in any literary work quite as magical, or paradigm altering as Death’s. The woman herself is often considered the second hero of this series and has inspired not only individual spin-offs but countless artistic pieces by fans and, thank goodness, scores of what now exists as the most tasteful female cosplay for girls wishing to avoid creepy dudes with a Powergirl or Red Sonja fetishes. Death, who is the physical manifestation of Death, talks to Dream and, like any good older sister, calls him out on his crap:

The reader may by now be wondering what does this have to do with Prometheus Bound and Greek Drama? What do comic books have to do with literature, mythology, and theism?

Well be patient, there’s one more passage to cite. Death takes Dream with her as she gathers souls to take to the “other side” and Dream is able to see how much the Endless affects the lives of mortals, and how much he, as one of them, has forgotten his own station:

I find myself wondering about humanity. Their attitude to my sister’s gift is so strange. Why do they fear the sunless lands? It is as natural to die s it is to be born. But they fear her. Feebly they attempt to placate her. They do not lover her. Many thousands of years

ago I heard a song in a dream, a mortal song that celebrated her gift. I still remember it.

“Death is before today: Like the recovery of a sick man, Like going forth into a garden after sickness.

“Death is before me today: Like the odor of myrrh, Like sitting under a sail in a good wind.

“Death is before me today: Like the course of a stream; Like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.

“Death is before me today: Like the home that a man longs to see, After years spent as a captive.”

That forgotten poet understood her gifts. My sister has a function to perform, even as I do. The Endless have their responsibilities. I have responsibilities. I walk by her side, and the darkness lifts from my soul. I walk with her, and I heat the gentle beating of mighty wings…”

Despite centuries of difference in time, cultural values, paradigms, emotions, artistic expectations, and philosophies both Aeschylus and Gaiman touch upon the idea that not even the gods had all of existence figured out. Dream is technically one of the “Endless,” a being that surpasses gods (I need to remember to appease the Internet Nerd Gods lest I suffer their wrath), and as the lord of dreams he governs over the dreams and ambitions of mortals, but even he is not immune to ignorance, pride, or fault. Looking back to Prometheus then, and wondering briefly about that Episcopalian god I left behind long ago, I think of Death.

Recently I looked at the symbol she wears around her neck. It’s an ankh, an Egyptian symbol standing for life and its essence. I bridged this topic at the book club and was dealt with the platitude, “Without life, death has no meaning.” This was painfully cotton candy pathetic, as most platitudes are, but not untrue. Death and Prometheus are possessed with a sight that surpasses the beings that surround them, there’s a reason that Death is Dream’s older brother, and both are ultimately rejected. Fire and death are lessons all of us must learn because they are balances. Fire is light and energy that pierces the dark, ripping at its near endless seems trying to defy it’s all encompassing power, but without the dark fire has no purpose.

The lessons of Death and Prometheus are lessons about suffering, and for that reasons they are the ones many of us have to learn at some point. I’ve retained enough lessons from my time in the Episcopal Church to remember that one lesson. Suffering in life in inevitable, whether it be from the choices you make, or from your own fear of the unknown, but everyone has to suffer if they’re going to acquire some kind of knowledge. Without some manner of pain or hurt there is no knowledge. Prometheus saw this, and as punishment Zeus sent an Eagle to eat his liver once a day.

Prometheus would eventually be freed from this punishment by Hercules as one of the Twelve Struggles he had to endure after killing his wife and family, and while there some comfort in this I’m still not sure why the man, the Titan has been bouncing around in my brain. It might be a phase of life-issue, grad-school ending and life about to begin, or else it may be my wife’s now daily conversation about having children. I don’t believe babies normally eat livers, but I suppose that’s a lesson I’ll have to learn, and maybe pass along to the progeny when they’re ready unless I can talk my wife out of it.

Then again “even husbands bow to necessity” when necessity comes in the form of a wife.

*Writer’s Note*

All passages from Prometheus Bound come from the Penguin Classics Edition which was translated by Philip Vellacott. I recognize that translations can be crappy or unreliable at times, but it’s the only edition I had on hand. If I’ve butchered the original intent of Aeschylus that fool knows where to find me.

When I was younger, I honestly can’t remember how old I was when my grandfather passed away, maybe twelve or eleven, I attended his funeral and did everything in my power to avoid looking at the body. It was open casket, and while I had been to at least one funeral before I head never actually seen a dead body, let alone the body of my grandfather. I still remember the night he died because I remember Dad answering the phone regularly, his mother calling him with updates. The old man had had one his legs amputated, some disease that was never fully explained to me, and when I sat in the dark and heard the phone ring one last time I knew he was gone. My grandfather was, and is still is a model of masculinity for me. He was a fantastic dancer, chain smoker, unashamed gun owner, stern Democrat, and for at least forty years he welded oil pipes. I’d known him before the stroke, before his mind had been wiped clean of every word he’d ever learned over the course of his life, before he’d been reduced to pissing in plastic cups and shitting on a padded toilet seat that made it a bitch to pee whenever we went down to visit. I didn’t want to look in the casket. Not because I was afraid of death, but because I wanted to be alone when I did it.

For me it was about strength, it was about facing the old man and having a small intimate moment. My grandfather was a man I loved and respected and I waited patiently by a bouquet of flowers that felt and smelt like chalk until I saw nobody by the body. The herds of old ladies decorated in pastel greys and pinks, there might have been pinks and if there were what kind of outlandish pimp dresses in pink to a funeral? I walked up to the casket, ready to say my goodbye when my grandmother jumped me out of nowhere. She and three women I didn’t recognize or know and care for at that moment shoved me along carefully up to the casket. The figure appeared. I stood my ground. I looked in.

His suit was the blue color I associated him with. It wasn’t a passionate color you could taste with your tongue, it was the blue of a man who spent his life working. His hair was stiff and pointed up, and the color was off. His hands were tucked above his waist, a position he had never and would never assume. But it was his skin and lips that I remember most. His color had been creamy peach with wet leather, his Cherokee blood always coming through, and his lips had been swallowed up by the color appearing only moderately pink. Now his skin looked like the wrong foundation and his lips were purple, clamped shut.

I broke. Seeing the old man I just broke. My grandmother, as if feeding off of my emotions began to cry herself and said something along the lines of “oh honey,” before her crowd surrounded me. I managed to shake them off and march down the aisle until I was in the front room. People watched me but I didn’t care, I tucked myself into a corner, stuck my head between my legs, and wept. They’d turned my grandfather into a sex doll.

I bought myself a copy of David Sedaris’s book When You Are Engulfed in Flames because the cover was a Van Gough painting, Skull with Cigarette, and I love skeletons, and I love David Sedaris, so the two of them together promised only brilliance. I know buying myself a book for Christmas and expecting my parents to wrap it sounds selfish and monstrous, but in my defense Barnes & Noble was offering free gift wrapping, plus everyone in my family does it. My father usually gets three presents for Christmas because he’s purchased some fancy tool that’s taken up half the space in his garage and so the lingering gifts are usually a NCIS DVD and some book about Naval warfare. The reason for buying the book though had less to do with skeletons than it did the author. I’d read Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls and written a review of the book and not long thereafter I began collecting the man’s work to complete my library with every intention of reviewing them as well. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk came and so did Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim too, but for whatever reason the muse didn’t call, she’s such a drama queen, it was her sister and it was only once, but when I finished the last essay in the collection, The Smoking Section, I knew I couldn’t pussyfoot out this time.

But what does the book have to do with my grandfather and a shit mortician’s make-up job? About every essay in the collection of When You Are Engulfed in Flameshas some element in it that addresses the issue of death; each story is designed to address or hint at mortality and, since it is David Sedaris, absorb the absurdity of the event that spawned the realization. Sedaris’s style of self-immolation, coupled with ego padding make this exercise as hilarious as it is morbid.

Take for instance a passage from the essay Monster Mash:

Even as a child I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense, but in an aesthetic one. A hamster of a guinea pig would pass away, and, after burying the body, I’d dig in back up: over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. It earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people’s pets. “Igor,” they called me. “Wicked, spooky.” But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least among adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project, the good kind that doesn’t involve homework. Most kids grow out of it, but the passing of time only heightened my curiosity. (110).

For the record I never dug up any pets when I was a kid, but I did have a similar morbid curiosity with death that eventually spiraled into a fondness for Heavy Metal. A habit of mine was stealing away to the horror section of Hastings to look at the DVDS that promised an endless sea of mutilation and blood. It was never that I wanted to kill any of these people, but there was some contentment in being so close to death. It was an abstract concept that, like Sedaris explains, only happened to people older than myself. Looking at the movies, and other gruesome pictures similar to it, was a way of learning early of my mortality so that later, when I began to recognize more and more that death happens to everyone, I was prepared. Thanks Freddy Kuregar. Actually fuck Freddy Cruegar, Long Live Michael Myers!

The reader may get the impression that Sedaris’s book is only about the morbid end of life, but this isn’t the case. Sedaris is able to execute a wide variety of deaths both literal and symbolic. In his essay Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie he describes his tendency to dress himself like “a hobo,” meaning that his selections of clothes are not avante garde so much as ”take what you can get.” In the essay his father recommends a bow tie:

My inner hobo begged me not to do it, but I foolishly caved in, thinking it couldn’t hurt to make an old man happy. Then again, maybe I was just tired and wanted to get through the evening saying as little as possible. The thing about a bow tie is that it does a lot of the talking for you. “Hey!” it shouts. “Look over here. I’m friendly, I’m interesting!” At least that’s what I thought it was saying. (60).

I thought much the same thing myself. I own five or six bow ties, however they aren’t the GQ modeled cloth masterpieces that I don’t know how to tie. In fact they’re the kitsch mass produced bowties decorated with moustaches, the Gryffendor logo, the Union Jack, and, my personal favorite, the black and white polka dot all of which are held on the body by a black elastic band. My bow ties don’t scream out culture and sophistication when I wear them, they scream out to people “Hey! I’m interesting! Ask me something!” They’re also a rejection of the standard tie I was forced to wear to chapel every Thursday for twelve years of my life. Last year during National Coming Out Day I wore that polka dot tie as well as a royal purple button down shirt, a solid black vest, and a black kilt as I handed out free condoms and candy to passing students who laughed. The kilt was the main element of my outfit and, much like the bowtie, it was supposed to be odd and strange and funny and weird. I wanted people to laugh at me and enjoy themselves and the bow tie was the bow on my beautiful package and I wish I hadn’t just written that.

This thought entered my head as I read the preceding quote, but a page later my world melted in an existential panic.

It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. “A bow tie announces to the world that you can no longer get an erection.” (61).

Imagine my panic and terror as I pictured every women and every man staring at that bow tie as I handed them condom with a smile on my face. The thought that drifted through their heads as they saw the connection of the bow tie and the rubber. Did they laugh at me then or later? Did they craft malicious visions and mockeries in their minds picturing me explaining to some girl or my wife that this never happened to me? Oh god they were smiling, what did they think of me, what did my wife think of me? And this of course kept me reading as Sedaris went on to perfectly explain this panic:

And that is exactly what a bow tie says. Not that you’re powerless, but that you’re impotent. People offer to take you home, not because you’re sexy but because you’re sexless, a neutered cat in need of a good stiff cuddle. This doesn’t mean that the bow tie is necessarily wrong for me, just that it’s a bit premature. When I explained this to my father, he rolled his eyes. Then he said that I had no personality. “you’re a lump.” (62).

My bow ties sit in the back of my closet next to an aluminum skeleton. I haven’t the heart to wear them for a while.

This skeletons though brings me to my favorite essay in the collection Memento Mori. His partner Hugh wanted a skeleton for Christmas and so he hunts for one, he finds one originally but the store won’t sell it claiming it’s their mascot, and when Hughs opens it the first thing he does is hang it in their bedroom.

I assumed he’d be using the skeleton as a model and was a little put off when, instead of taking it to his studio, he carried it into the bedroom and hung it from the ceiling.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked.

The following morning, I reached undder the bed for a discarded sock and found what I thought was a three-tiered earring. It looked like something you’d get a craft fair, not pretty, but definiitly handmade, fashioned from what looked like petrified wood. I was just holding it to the side of my head when I thought, Hang on, this is an index finger.

[…]

I don’t think of myself as overly prissy, but it bothered me to find a finger on my bedroom floor. “If this thing is going to start shedding parts, you really should put it in your studio,” I said to Hugh, who told me that it was his present and he’d keep it wherever the hell he wanted to. Then he got out some wire and reattached the missing finger. (153).

This story seemed to possess a special relevance for me because everything I write is in front of a skeleton, or really behind it. My wife has had, ever since she was a little girl that growled at people, a fascination/reverence of skulls and skeletons, so much so that when she turned sixteen she asked her parents for a complete one. Now an actual human skeleton can run anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, so the model she got was fake but still somewhere around $180. The bones are obviously fake; when the light shines on them they have a dull plastic sheen and a few “teeth” are “missing” giving the appearance that this plastic person was a meth addict in their pathetic plastic life. She’s glued a moustache to the face, and when I first met him, for it is a he, he wore a purple beret. My wife informed me that his name was Harold.

I know some men that would have been put off by a skeleton right next to the door when they walk in, the kind of woman that keeps a skeleton summons images of witches severing penises with their fangs before boiling them in iron pots to high pitched cackling, but I didn’t. Growing up watching Tim Burton films on repeat ad nauseum I didn’t feel afraid or put off by Harold, in fact I loved the guy. I would greet him every time I entered her apartment. After we got married there was a small conflict of where to keep him in our house, but it didn’t take long for him to wind up in my office.

The similarity, or that moment when I recognized a similar development in my own life had a certain charm, as did his later examination of the fact:

It’s funny how certain objects convey a message—my washer and dryer, for example. They can’t speak, of course, but whenever I pass them they remind me that I’m doing fairly well. “No more laundromat for you,” they hum. My stove, a downer, tells me every day that I can’t cook, and before I can defend myself my scale jumps in, shouting from the bathroom, “Well, he must be doing something. My numbers are off the charts.” The skeleton has a much more limitec vocabulary and says only one thing: “you are going to die.” (154).

When I look at Harold from sitting in my desk I see his ass first, or really his hollow pelvis and coccyx. Harold ass doesn’t tell me that I’m going to die, but really that my fat ass is one day going to be gone, and that’s a troublesome thought as I sit in front of my computer, literally surrounded by books, writing and sending out essays hoping somebody somewhere will give a shit and read them. I’ve taken to using Harold as a kind of Coat rack. He wears my hat, my scarves, and holds my Barnes & Noble Catch-22 bag for me in one hand. Very well dressed gentleman he’s become these days. Whenever I get home the first action I perform is shuffle to my office, say hello to him, and say something or other before returning him his hat. ‘Here you are sir, thanks for letting me borrow it.” Harold’s become the man in the office, occupying and watching after the books in my absence, and it’s come to the point that, if she tried, my wife would never be able to take him back.

Harold doesn’t just tell me, remind me, that I’m going to die, he reminds me that I only have a certain amount of time before I do. That work needs to be done, but that it doesn’t matter anyway because you can only ever appreciate the complicated riddle of a skulls smile until death stops being something that happens to grandparents. Staring at a skeletons ass really gives you perspective in this life.

These musings and memories are not meant to be indulgent but rather to be illustrative of Sadaris’s ability to capture the little moments and decisions in his life and note the absurdity of them. When You Are Engulfed in Flames tackles the day to day experiences that remind the writer of death, whether it’s the complete death of individual existence, or else the death of someone he knew and was. It is a platitude, but each morning a person is reborn and given an opportunity to do and be more than they were before, but as is often the case we simply fall into a pattern of life because our desire for comfort and familiarity takes precedence. Death is, as Camus and countless other observed, the ultimate absurdity, or as Eric Idle put it best, “for Life is Quite Absurd, and death’s the final word.”

I’ll end with one last observance. In the collection is an essay entitled Old Faithful, which also appeared in The Best American Essays of 2005. It begins with a small and ominous line:

Out of nowhere I developed this lump. (228).

One of my history professors, who I later discovered to be bat-crap crazy and despised by many of the people in her department, shared to me one day that she never thought she would become that old woman always discussing her health problems. It was a small matter-of-fact statement, not really conversation, but it was eye opening. No friends of mine discussed their health because, apart from hang-overs, nobody really suffered any problems. Illness, like death, only happened to old people. But Sedaris uses this ailment to touch upon a different direction. His partner Hugh offers to lance the boil, and after opening it up, dry heaving, and cleaning it they wind up back in bed together.

When my boil was empty, he doused it with alcohol and put a bandage on it, as if it had been a minor injury, a shaving cut, a skinned knee, something normal he hadn’t milked like a dead cow. And this, to me, was worth at least a hundred of the hundred and twenty nights of Sodom. Back in bed I referred to him as Sir Lance-a lot.

“Once is not a lot,” he said.

This was true, but Sir Lance Occasionally lacks a certain ring.

“Besides,” I said. “I know you’ll do it again if I need you to. We’re an aging monogamous couple, and this is all part of the bargain.”

The thought of this kept Hugh awake that night, and still does. We go to bed and he stares toward the windows as I sleep soundly beside him, my bandaged boil silently weeping onto the sheets. (238-9).

Looking at this passage I think about the fact I’m about four and half months away from my second wedding anniversary. Edith and I have not been married long, but we were engaged for three years before we tied the knot. Our relationship is nowhere near an aging monogamous couple, but I’ve found already a real comfort in the companionship, and looking at this essay I think about the likeliest scenario of such an event. My wife wouldn’t lance the boil, nor would she offer to, but I know as soon as I mentioned it she would disappear into her phone and within an hour she would find the diagnosis, home-made recommendations for the proper way of treating it, three doctors in town I could go see the next day, and she would carefully, and lovingly, pester me into submission before my masculine façade bullshit could take over. And if that didn’t work she would raise one eyebrow and my spine would melt.

When You Are Engulfed In Flames doesn’t prepare the reader for death, so much as it readies the reader to recognize the strange beauty of life and its oddities. There are few books that possess a wondrous assortment of experiences and observations about mortality that can still make you laugh. Sedaris’s book will most likely find its way next to Johns across American, for often his work is found in the humor section beside MAD books and biographies of Amy Poehler, but the reader that picks the book up hoping to find something to read while he squeezes out a turd will most likely be bumfuzzled and left wondering at the skeleton on the cover smoking his cigarette wondering what’s so funny.

When You Are Engulfed In Flames can be found at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Hastings, and Wherever books are sold.

**Writer’s Note**

I really wanted to squeeze this quote in somehow but I hit the 3000 mark and I didn’t want to push it too far. It seemed a crime though to review this book and not give the reader, arguably the best paragraph written in the entire work. Please enjoy:

Shit is the tofu of cursing and be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit, for how had I so misjudged these people? (167).

Speaking a true vulgarian, Sedaris doesn’t just write this passage, as physically manifest truth in written words, not to mention validate much of my personal vocabulary.

**Writer’s FINAL NOTE**

I realize the reader may get the wrong impression by my introduction, that there is a lack of reverence for my grandfather, after all GOOD grandchildren don’t compare their grandparents to sex-dolls. Well allright cry-babies, if you’re so damn sensitive here it is, one of my favorite photos of the man.

Elbert “Bo” Smith on the right, Portrait of the Writer as a young yet incredibly handsome man on the left.

My grandfather was a good man and I miss him everyday. If can’t get the joke then fuck off.

When was the day that the person you were died and a new person began? That’s the question Daytripper asks of its reader and damn if it it doesn’t hold back.

Now my regular reader may object, “Didn’t you already review this book? And why didn’t you come to MeeMa’s birthday party?” But I would like to remind my steady reader that MeeMa’s apartment smells like cat-piss and death and this is the woman who called me butt sniffer at my last birthday party, so she can jump in a lake. As for your first question you’re right I did write about my latest reading of the book, however my review left me unsatisfied. There’s a reason I read this book at least once every year: I’m going to die, but in a way I’ve died already several times in my life.

You see before Neville Longbottom reminded us that people die every day, Daytripper was doing just that through the life of Brás de Oliva Domingos. Brás is the son of an internationally acclaimed novelist who writes obituaries for a living while trying to find something in his life worth working towards. Often the dialogue is centered on either the importance of family, friends, or living life, but beneath all of these concerns is the larger question of whether Brás life is living a dream. This may sound esoteric or, lord forbid, pompously intellectual and everything a regular comic book reader would detest. Normally I would agree were it not for the introduction that establishes the ethos of the book immediately:

This Introduction sets the reader up for everything they’ll hope to expect in Daytripper, namely a blending of the supernatural so often found in superhero comics, while a careful balance of reality so often found in depressing unreadable novels by Samuel Becket (You heard me existentialists, come and get me). I think this balance is found in the breathtaking artwork, but also with the general questions put forth by the author. There’s a point in Chapter six when a plane crashes into the city and Brás has to write the obituaries for the victims all the while his best friend in the world Jorge is missing. After a week of work he receives a phone call:

I was on the next flight you know. I was already inside the plane when they took us out, and we heard the news. I flipped out, man! It could’ve been me on that plane. And for What? No job is worth dying for. So I wondered what is right? I thought I had a great life, great job, fun with the chicks…but nothing in my life is extraordinary. Nothing in my life really matters. Life is too short man. I’ve been wasting time. I can’t go back to that life. I’m never coming back.

Brás: Jorge wait a minute let’s talk this through.

Jorge: Card is running out of credits. I gotta go. Take care Brás. Do something with your life. Something that matters. (148-9).

The next shot is of Brás in a car off to Rio to find his friend only to be stopped by a pair of crashing eighteen wheelers that result in one of the many deaths described at the end of each chapter.

Speaking of which the narrative rhythms of Daytripper will probably bug some readers since, as I’ve mentioned before, Brás dies at the end of each chapter. The first time I read the book I will admit it was a little confusing, but to be fair so was Prometheus and now that’s one of my favorite films of all time. Daytripper regularly challenges its reader to decide for themselves if Brás is really dying, or else he’s writing obituaries for the man he was before this new event came in and changed his life. These death’s include being shot at a bar, drowning in the ocean during a festival, being hit by a food truck, having a heart attack in his father’s study, being electrocuted by a telephone wire, being struck by the eighteen wheelers, being stabbed to death by Jorge, and finally dying in surgery while on a book tour (the last two deaths are implied but I’ll get to that later). Now looking at each of these deaths there doesn’t immediately appear to be to be any significance to the deaths. It’s only when looking at the context that meaning becomes clear. Looking at them again it’s important to note that: the first is when the bartenders nephew robs the bar needing money and Brás was just talking about family, he drowns while looking for a girl he met and fell in love with in town, he gets hit by the truck when running back to meet a girl he saw in a market realizing that she’s the one, he gets electrocuted when he’s only a few years old and chasing after a kite following a visit to his grandparents, he suffers the heart attack on the same day his father dies and his son is born, he’s struck by the car when he decides to drive to Rio to find Jorge, when he finds Jorge he discovers his friend has gone completely insane, and his final death isn’t even seen since it’s presented through the reaction of his wife and son.

Each of the deaths may at first appear kitsch or gimmicky given Brás’s profession, but if the reader writes them off as a weak narrative strategy by the artists they’re only missing the opportunity Daytripper offers.

There are moments in our life where the person we were, for lack of a better phrase, dies and we become someone new. It may be our first kiss, it may be the day our children are born, it may be the day we meet the person who we’ll marry, it may be the day we get divorced and have to start over, it may be the day your father or mother dies, it may be the day you lose your virginity, or it may even be the day you die or at least recognize that you’re going to.

These moments are what gives life its wonderful and fucking annoying as hell quality that it does. We’ll never know who we will be or what choices we will face because life changes so suddenly, almost abstractly, and we have to find a way to create meaning from the deaths of these people we thought we knew or else pretended to know.

I know I’m sounding like a fucking poetry slam right now dear reader but it’s only because this book isn’t soft. It’s fucking hard and pushes you to ask these questions. My previous review of this book was incredibly emotional and dealt with my question of my own masculinity and mortality, and it’s most likely because so much has happened to me over the course of the last year. I’ve been married, moved out of my parents house, lived with my in-laws for several months, moved into a new house, figured out the rhythms of married life, and am about to graduate with my masters in English in which case I now begin to look for a job…so if you don’t hear from me for a while it’s because I probably died alone and poor in a ditch somewhere, at least that’s what engineers and business majors tell me.

I’ve hit the point in my life where I read Jorge’s advice and I ask the question: What have I really done?

It’s the question Brás keeps returning to over and over no matter how old he is. On the one hand it may just be that he’s trying to live up the image of his old man, the internationally acclaimed author, and to be fair…those are some pretty big shoes to fill, but I think beyond the writing is something else, some desperate search for meaning between the odd moments of his life.

The next to last chapter of the book is a dream, that’s the only way to describe it. It begins on a boat with a goddess and ends with Brás on a beach in front of his typewriter writing:

My name is Brás de Oliva Domingos

I can’t really tell how old I am, only that I’m too young to wonder if I asked the right questions in the past, and too old to wish the future will bring me all the answers.

In my dreams, I am the writer of my own story although I never write about myself, this obituary being the first and last exception.

All the places my dreams take me, no matter if I’ve never been there or never will be…help me understand where I come from…and where I want to go.

So what my own dreams show me is what my life can be once I open my eyes.

My dreams tell me who I am.

My name is Brás de Oliva Domingos. This is the story of my life. Take a deep breath, open your eyes and close the book. (222-4).

When I first read Daytripper, the book was about how to be a writer, but as I’ve grown I’ve begun to realize that the book is more about family. What you inherit from them, and what you leave behind. When Brás’s son talks to him at the end of the book there’s a simple line:

That’s not strange at all. That’s family. We carry our family around inside of us. It’s who we are. (239).

Now once my reader puts down the wine bottle and groans that they have their mother inside them and their kids are screwed they should really hold onto that sentence for a moment and let it sink in. In our life we carry our dreams close to our heart and we feel that they are what makes our life what it is, and I won’t lie that dream is what certainly pushes us into the paths in life we most desire, whether we follow a straight path is all up to the individual experience. Family however is what tends to make us for inherit something from the ones that came before.

I spoke in the last review of the book about fathers, but I’d like to end this one on mothers. There’s a story Brás’s mother tells the children about the day he was born: I apologise for the poor quality:

Just about every mother, at least every good one in my experience, has a narrative surrounding the birth or some moment in the life of their child. It’s an aspect of motherhood that gives it its charm and definitive quality in many ways. As such my own mother story is the story of how I got my nickname, or really name at this point since more people know me as Jammer than then do my actual first name.

They way she told it was after she married Dad she became an unofficial member of the rugby team Dad played with at A&M. Now the thing about the team was that everybody got a nickname at some point. Dad’s was Andy Capp because he used to always wear a cap like the cartoon character you probably don’t recognize. Along with him there was Pisser, Whale Bait, Hands, Hollywood, Little John, etc., and Mom of course was Sniglet…to this day nobody remembers why she was Sniglet, but fuck it her name’s Sniglet move on, gah! Well one night they were out drinking, Mom was drinking club soda or at least I hope lest many of my sparkling personality traits become obvious to the reader, and I began to kick. As of this writing I’m 6” 3 but even back then I was large baby and since during the gestation process the babies head is pointed down towards the vagina and the feet are pointed towards the ribs, and if you factor in the fact that Mom was a small woman, my kicks were pretty damn hard. What happened next set the stage for everything. One of the rugby guys saw Sniglet hopping at each kick, he stumbled over, pointed to my stomach and slurred out, “Hey’s he’s jamming her, jamher jammer!” And so, as the saying goes, the name was made.

My name is now more a part of me than the name Josh and, while I can thank that drunk rugby player for his contribution, it’s my mother gift of the story that it exists at all. Our families give us our power and identity and we strive to achieve it.

It’s easy to dismiss Daytripper as yet another book on the market of a self-analyzing neurotic writer worried about whether he’s attained his dreams, but if the reader does that they’ve missed the point of the book. We work towards our dreams every day. Whether we attain them in the end is immaterial, but as we work towards them we become more and more complex as individuals because of the people we meet, or because of the people we come from. Our families are in our bones, for good and for bad, and they don’t leave us as we move forward, and our friends, if they’re the right ones, become just as much a part of us as our families. Daytripper is about the death of the people we were as we develop into the people we become, and Moon and Bá show their reader that, even if it is a death of some kind it’s not to be mourned because those people don’t leave. We just carry them with us as we move forward.

Daytripper can be found on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and wherever graphic novels are sold.

**Writer’s Note**

I told you the last two deaths would come back but I just plain forgot about them. The next to last chapter is a dream, a reflection on the summation of Brás’s life, while the final chapter is the actual end. Brás is diagnosed with multiple brain tumors and the closing shot is him standing on the beach at night looking out over the ocean. I know he dies, intellectually I know it, but in that moment is a sublime sensation of the life.

Life is a fucking weird-ass abstract term that we’ll never truly appreciate till we’re dead, about to be. It’s the mark of a great work that can make me feel even a hint at that wonder with just a few lines and color.

**Writer’s Second Note**

I’ve included a link below to a review of the graphic novel done by NPR. Enjoy.